The Hindu Business Line : <I>Capote</I>: The two sides of writing

"HOT islands and buried gold, diving deep in fire-blue seas towards sunken treasure — such dreams were gone. Gone, too, was `Perry O'Parsons,' the name invented for the singing sensation of stage and screen that he had half-seriously hoped some day to be.

Perry O'Parsons had died without ever having lived. What was there to look forward to? He and Dick were `running a race without a finish line' - that was how it struck him... So, tomorrow, with only twenty seven dollars left of the money raised in Kansas City, they were heading west again, to Texas, to Nevada - `nowhere definite." - from `In Cold Blood' by Truman Capote.

Halfway through Bennet Miller's slow film, one felt it was going nowhere definite. Capote was a great writer and there he (Philip Seymour Hoffman) was, lying to convicted killer, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr) — a key subject of his book — telling him that the book had no title and nothing had been written. For Smith, condemned to the gallows for murdering four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, Capote may have been of help for appeals to higher Courts. But more importantly, the writer was the sole owner of his story, one that had spilt blood and would end by hanging on April 14, 1965.

A celebrity author before the Kansas murders, it was Capote who saw the newspaper story and travelled to Holcomb. It was again him, who befriended the captured Smith with a fistful of aspirins. It was he who coaxed their stories out of Smith and his accomplice, Dick Hickock (Mark Pellegrino), brought in a fashion photographer to take their pictures for publicity, attended Court hearings and seemed to empathise with their lives gone wrong.

Seemed to. For, soon after withholding the title of his book from Smith, Capote was the recipient of a standing ovation at the first reading. Was Smith a mere source for Capote's non-fiction novel? Viewed from the premise of a famous author and the image of perfection it brings, that nagging doubt of deceit, halfway through the film, made Miller's work hard to swallow. In retrospect — particularly when juxtaposed with Capote's guilt, shown in the film's latter half — the brilliance of `Capote' lay in dispassionately portraying these two sides of a famous author. The film invites suspicion of intent, for Capote's early statements of attachment to the convict comes too fast, too soon.

It was a dilemma caused in part by Capote's need to write, in part by publishers who sensed the potential of the new book. But at some point, the writer had to lead his subjects along for the story and at later, leave them for his book. As Capote's reading was underway, one got the eerie feeling that his interest in Perry Smith may have been driven by the desire for a perfect sentence. Strangely for Smith, with murder on his hands, his own carving up by Capote may have been a redeeming factor. "I would like to have a friend there," he tells Capote, asking the writer to witness his hanging. The film takes no sides; it rests content as a document about the book's creation. In as much as it exposes Capote, it also shows Smith's sister warning the writer not to be taken in by her brother's sensitive side.

Philip Seymour Hoffman lives Capote to the smallest detail, from that almost annoyingly effeminate bearing and talk, to Capote, the attention seeker and finally, the person who probably wished he didn't exist as Smith's last minutes ticked in. Remember him as George Willis Jr in `Scent Of A Woman'; compare that to what you see in the `Mission Impossible 3' trailer now at theatres — you know that Hoffman is an actor of great diversity. Catherine Keener as Harper Lee, Capote's friend from childhood, gives a rock steady performance. `Capote' releases here on February 24. It is a serious film, rather trying in the parts, but remarkable on the whole. Interestingly, this may not be the final word on Truman Capote. The book `In Cold Blood' was made into an Oscar-nominated film in 1967. And yet to be released is `Infamous,' starring Toby Jones as Capote and Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee.